“Yes, Papa,” she says, but with a hint of disappointment in her voice.
“Put the milk on, will you?”
She complies, leaving him nothing to do and somewhat contrite: heating the milk is a task Janja always assigns to him.
“Do you feel a draft?”
“No.”
Still, he shuts the window.
The girl lifts the pot from the stove in a self-assured, feminine way and sets it on the table.
“Is it warm enough?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Mama told me to make sure it was warm.”
The girl looks up at him, wondering whether he is making fun of Mama, but in the end she decides to smile.
“Try it.”
He takes her smile as a sign of complicity and smiles back.
“No, no. You’re the housewife today.”
She cocks her head contentedly and starts setting the table. He sits down.
“Do you like making your own breakfast?”
“I do.”
“My mother used to make breakfast for me,” he says didactically, ashamed of himself for including her in his family, which is most likely not hers. “My sister too. You know I had a sister, don’t you? Estera. She was a little like you. I don’t mean that she looked like you, but she acted like you.”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
“That you had a sister and she was killed in the war.”
“Yes, darling. She and my father and mother.”
“And your mother’s sister, Darinka.”
“That’s right. My mother’s sister, Darinka. And many others. Thousands.”
“Why did they let themselves be killed?” she asks thoughtfully, pausing with the sugar bowl in her hand and looking at him inquisitively with her curious, clear blue eyes. “I’d have tried to defend myself, I think.”
“Some of them did try to defend themselves. My sister did. She shot back at her murderers. But not everybody could. It was very hard. You’ll understand when you grow up.”
UNLIKE THE RESTLESS and rarely cheerful Miroslav, Estera Blam was quiet, a homebody. She liked to “rest,” as Blanka Blam euphemistically characterized her daughter’s tendency to sit in a corner or recline in an armchair and stare at the patterned curtains or the faces of the family as they talked. It was probably because she spent so much time indoors that, even as she grew into adolescence, she remained pale and chubby. She got on well with girls her own age, with boys too, for that matter, yet she had almost no friends. When friends of her mother brought children to play with her, she was perfectly willing to let them take over her dolls and toy furniture and miniature cake tins, but she never asked to go and see them. Like a small domestic animal, she felt most comfortable in the nook where she was born, so she loved first her house and later its extension, school. She attended school with the punctuality of a pedant: she never missed a homework assignment, kept all the prescribed paraphernalia in her satchel, and was so careful with her schoolbooks that she did not even need to cover them. Vilim Blam, whose vanity led him to favor his male offspring, secretly thought his daughter simple-minded. Nor would Blanka Blam have been surprised if Estera, for all her academic zeal, had made only mediocre progress; that Blanka had not done particularly well at school herself she ascribed as much to her sex as to anything else. But such was not the case with Estera. While Miroslav with his nimble mind stood out in elementary school, slacking off later on to such an extent that they had to hire private tutors at the end of every year to get him through, Estera was at the top of her class from the start and maintained her position there unwaveringly.
She had a phenomenal memory: anything registered by her big brown eyes and fleshy ears — word, name, number — was engraved in her memory as in wax.
Helpful as it was in school and in the normal circumstances of growing up, her memory became a burden when the wave of social reckoning reached Vojvoda Šupljikac Square. Estera suddenly found herself in the position of a hen sitting on eggs that someone had maliciously sneaked into her nest. All the ominous rumors that other people clucked at and then put out of their minds as unbelievable, she registered carefully and for all time in her impartial memory bank. She ingested all the daily news, no matter how far-fetched or self-contradictory, absorbed every émigré’s story, assimilated all written and oral reports of the sufferings and deaths of innocent people, and before long her round, listless, but observant eyes and sheeplike ears were taking in the chaos occurring in her immediate vicinity.
It began when Vilim Blam, being a Jew, lost his position at the newspaper for which he had worked with all his heart and soul for two decades: he was demoted from reporting to advertising. The change would not have noticeably affected conditions at home had it not noticeably affected his morale, for although he could make as much money by selling advertising as he could by writing articles, he had no desire to invest his energy in something unless he saw it the next day, as usual, in print under his name. So instead of making the rounds of the tradesmen and artisans, briefcase in hand, he would succumb to the lure of the coffee house even more than before, drinking much too much and poisoning the atmosphere with his politics. Telephone, electricity, and gas bills began piling up on the dining room sideboard, and the grocer grew more and more insistent that his account be settled.
Blanka Blam, unfamiliar with the ways of earning money because at the onset of married life her husband had laughingly refused to share any such information with her, took to seeking advice from the neighbors, and once her naive hope of finding some simple but lucrative part-time employment evaporated, she came to the conclusion that like an impoverished widow she would have to take in a tenant. At first Vilim Blam rejected the idea outright, arguing that Hitler and his ludicrous homegrown followers were on the brink of collapse, but eventually the pressure of unpaid bills forced him to yield. He did set one condition, though: they were not to take in just anybody, a student from the countryside or petty official, people his wife would find demeaning to serve; they were to find someone who could be respected by their circle as a friend of the family. It was Vilim who brought home a tenant: an unmarried newspaperman, his younger colleague, one might even say his protégé, Predrag Popadić.
Popadić was twenty-six at the time and new to journalism. He had come to it at the insistence of his father, a well-to-do landowner in the area who had grown tired of supporting his eternal student son in Belgrade and had pulled strings with the governor, who enjoyed the influential Popadić Senior’s political patronage. The young man was good-looking and had a cheerful disposition; he enjoyed dressing well and was always clean and clean-shaven, thin, black mustache neatly trimmed and wavy black hair lightly pomaded. He was not much interested in journalism, or interested only insofar as it gave him an entrée to the town’s high society — more precisely, to its beautiful and beautifully groomed women, on whom he constantly trained his lively, brown, doglike eyes. But when he lacked the funds for the sort of gallant rendezvous requiring flowers or a gift (and he often lacked funds, spending extravagantly when he had them), he was content with conquests of a lower order: the widow Csokonay complained to Blanka Blam that Popadić could not keep his hands off her when she cleaned his room, and he was not above bringing a somewhat tarnished specimen of female home from a coffee house, though he always did his best to slip her through the entrance hall unnoticed.
At one time a man of such loose behavior would have met with censure in a family like the Blams, but now they looked the other way. Besides, for Vilim Blam, Popadić represented a living link with the paper, with the intoxicating smell of printer’s ink, the glory of boldface bylines, and whenever Vilim found him at home alone — that is, not in disreputable company — he would fairly beg him to join the family at table, where he would interrogate him about the latest goings-on, the intrigues and backbiting that every newsroom thrives on, and the true state of politics and war preparations, which newsmen gleaned from the gossip they heard and the odd communiqué they picked up at government offices. Their conversations, which lasted well into night when Popadić lacked the wherewithal to go out on the town, were of interest to other members of the family as well. Torn at the time between the nightly scenes at the bathroom window and his first encounters with Lili, Miroslav saw Popadić as the embodiment of the free, mature male, who, when he was in a good mood, would give the lad a conspiratorial poke in the ribs and show him pictures of naked women. Estera steered clear of him — his burning eyes and masculine odor, both repulsive and attractive, were not lost on her — but she would sit in her corner for hours watching him smoke, cross his legs in their dark silk socks, and stroke his mustache.